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unusual problem w/ 16gig patriot thumb drive

i went to bed last night and everything worked just fine. at some point overnight my computer randomly restarted itself. this morning when i turned on the monitor and begun using my system i noticed it was slow, and buggy, and all sorts of not-good.
i used a norton antivirus scan which took care of a few issues, cookies mostly, and one backdoor trojan that it required a restart to get rid of. ok. save everything and restart.
windows will no longer boot. the system progresses to the windows logo, then restarts. sucks. but i'n not here for windows help, so lets put that to the side. the reason i explain all of this is to clarify 2 things
1)that the issue isn't on my desktop as i do not get that message without the drive plugged in
and
2)what i tried to do with the drive. namely: make it a bootable windows install disk

on my laptop, using a windows 7 ISO file (which can be legally obtained through microsoft) and a program called "windows 7 usb/dvd download tool" which is a microsoft program, you can format a USB stick, and make it effectively a "windows 7 installation drive"

ok. so far so good.

i use the usb/dvd program, it gets to step 4, and then tells me that it can not copy the files.
looking online i see that i an not unique when it comes to this error. for some reason the program just does not like different thumb drives.

i found another program that allowed me to "burn" an ISO to a thumb drive, and used it. it seemed to work fine.

so, i boot up my pc, set it to boot via usb, and have the drive plugged in, when i get the error message.
i did think at first it WAS a pc problem. i now know it is not.
rebooting my PC without the thumb drive resulted in no error message (though the reboot before loading windows problem remained)
i then plugged the thumb drive into my laptop and rebooted. the error message showed up upon reboot. rebooting again without the thumb drive and windows loaded successfully.

i now have a thumb drive that for all intents and purposes DOES STILL WORK, however, it will not format, not in fat, fat32 or ntsf. not on quick format or slow. i don't know if it's an unfixable problem or not. i'm hoping i can get information here on how to fix the issue, because my laptop does not have a dvd burner, so my thumb drive is the only way i can create a bootable recovery or installation disk for my laptop.

i do apologize for being so long winded, but because i think my problem might not be very common, and in the interest of providing as much information as possible, i wrote a good deal more than intended.